by Logan Fox
I spin around and give Saint Amos the finger. Then I stalk over the lawn, heading for the classroom block. I’m early for my next class, but if a brisk walk through the drumming rain can’t clear my head, nothing can.
I was going to skip out on Zachary’s class. I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have reported me. But I can’t bear the thought of being stuck alone with my thoughts one second longer.
Halfway down the slight incline, my shoe hits a patch of thinning grass and I slip in the mud.
I sit for a moment like that, rainwater soaking through my dress, before I push myself up and carry on walking.
Fuck you, Universe. I’ve had worse.
Don’t have your notes, Trinity. Textbook’s still in your room.
And so what? Let Zachary write me up for detention.
The rain should be steaming off my skin, that’s how mad I am. But all it does is pound down, wet and relentless, until I finally step under cover of the eaves. I shove open the door and storm inside, heading for Zachary’s class.
Breathing hard from climbing the stairs, I pause a second outside his door before going in.
I come to a stop as soon as I’m inside.
He’s at his desk, hand cupping his jaw as he stares at nothing. When he looks up at me, the heavy frown on his face clears in an instant.
He gets to his feet, watching me expectantly.
“What?” I snap. “Did you also forget how to thank someone?” My skirts whisk around my legs as I storm up to him. “It’s easy. You say, ‘thank you,’ and then I tell you to go fuck yourself, because it wasn’t a pleasure.”
His frown is back. “What?”
“The files.” I wave my hand. “The things I copied. You got it back, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but—” he begins, stepping around the desk.
“But nothing. The least you owe me is a thank you, and I’m still fucking waiting.” I grab my hips and start tapping my foot. “Well?”
“Well nothing.” He rushes forward, grabbing the side of my dress before I can move out of reach. “Did you even find his laptop?”
“Wh-what?” I splutter.
“How did this play out in your head, hmm?” He drags me with him as he heads for the door.
And then he locks it.
I go stiff a moment before the panic hits.
“Let go!” I yank at his hand, but he’s holding on so tight I’d probably tear the fabric before I could peel off his fingers.
Instead of releasing me, he slams me into the wall beside the door. Even if someone were to look through the frosted glass, they wouldn’t see either of us.
I open my mouth to scream, but he slaps a hand over my lips before I can get a sound out.
Fuck.
I try and knee him.
He kicks my legs open and wedges himself between my thighs, inadvertently hiking up my dress to a rather inappropriate height. When I go for his eyes with clawed fingers, he grabs my wrists and slams them into the wall above my head.
Fuck!
“Listen carefully, Miss Malone, because I’m only going to say this once,” he hisses in my ear. “There was nothing on that drive.”
I yell against his hand, but of course he can’t understand me. And all my protest earns me is him slamming his body against mine and driving the air out of my lungs.
I collapse against him, wheezing.
“You’re not listening.”
I try and say “I’m sorry” through his hand. Some of it must come through because he eases up ever so slightly on my wrists and pulls back so he’s not crushing me to the wall.
For some reason, my body responds with despair at the sudden loss of pressure. Like I somehow enjoyed the fact that he was suffocating me.
He puts his mouth by my ear again. “You seem to think you can just do whatever the fuck you want. Let me assure you, little girl, that’s nowhere near accurate.”
My eyes are squeezed shut, but he stays quiet for so long that I dare to open one just to peek at him.
He’s watching me like a jungle cat.
“We need that data.” He squeezes my wrists, grating the bones together. I mewl against his hand, nodding furiously to convey just how ready I am to listen and obey.
“You will go back to him tonight. Do you understand?”
Another furious volley of nods.
The fury on his face subsides a little. He studies me again, his gaze tracing every contour on my face.
“And you will bring it to us the moment you have it, not a minute later. Do you understand?”
I nod and then push a vehement, “Yes” through his fingers.
His lips quirk into a smile that’s as cold as the ruthless gleam in his eyes. “Good girl.”
It shouldn’t, but even his backhanded praise sends a sensuous ripple through me. Perhaps it’s just relief that he’s decided not to slit my throat.
I squirm a little, trying to convey to him that I would be happy to comply even more if he stopped pinning me to the wall like a maniac.
His eyes grow hooded. Slowly, he slides his fingers off my lips. They settle around my throat, which isn’t much better for my health, but at least now I can talk.
Which means I could try to persuade him that I’m on his side.
Their side.
It doesn’t have to be true. Fuck it, it definitely isn’t true. But I like to believe I’m getting better at lying. Or, at least, warping the truth to my advantage.
But first, I need to figure out why he seems dead set on the fact that I didn’t do my job.
“I did what you said.” I keep my voice soft and low, not wanting to provoke the beast that’s only now starting to retreat. “I don’t know why it didn’t—”
“Think we give a fuck about your excuses?” he rasps. My eyes fly shut as he starts squeezing my throat. “We don’t!”
“But I did everything you said.” Despite my best efforts, frustration builds as I force my voice to stay calm. “I found the laptop under his bed, and I put the drive into the—”
“I don’t want to hear it, little girl.”
Boiling hot anger pours into me. I’ve had just about enough of everyone in my life telling me what the fuck to do. How the fuck to feel. What I can and cannot control. Which version of the truth they think they can get away with.
My father and I were never on the best terms, that’s a given. He ruled our house with an iron fist, and I always resented him for that. But I obeyed, because it’s what my parents expected from me. Because the bible said so.
Honor your parents somehow became shorthand for blindly obeying every single rule. For letting them tell you what to believe and how to behave.
They shouldn’t have treated you like that.
No, Father Gabriel—fucking Gabe—they shouldn’t have. But they did.
Everyone did.
Everyone still does.
Will it never end?
Or has it only gone on this long because I’ve let it? Because I submitted where a normal, sane human being would long ago have thrown off their shackles and stormed the plantation?
My veins thrum with sullen rage as Zachary carries on talking, his mouth an inch from my ear. “I don’t care how you do it, but you will get us that data, and you will—”
My eyes fly open. “No!” I yell. “If you want it so bad, get it yourself!”
His fingers tighten even more as he grinds his hips into me. “Did you just shout at me?”
I freeze when his hard-on presses into my belly.
Oh my God. He’s enjoying this!
I almost laugh at the thought. Of course he’s enjoying this—his dick was twice this size when he was spanking me, what the fuck am I expecting? He gets off on other people’s pain, so I guess humiliating them, torturing them, it’s all the same.
“Gabriel’s busy.” I swallow and try not to let the feel of his cock distract me. “He told me so last night. He’ll be busy this whole week.”
He rakes his gaze over
my body, and then glances to the side. Curiosity, of course, gets the better of me.
It’s ten past one.
His class starts at half-past.
We both look back at the same time. He moves against me again, and this time it’s obvious he wants me to feel his erection. My heart spasms with panic while my inner thighs contract with the urgent need to close and deny him access.
Dear Lord, all he has to do is dip down, and he could be inside me. If we were both naked of course. But he’s wearing slacks, and I’m in this monstrosity of a dress, so—
“I know what you’re thinking,” he murmurs. His mouth twitches, and then he’s biting down on his lower lip, drawing that tender flesh through his teeth. “But as much as I’d like nothing more than to fuck you against this wall, we both know this isn’t how it happens.”
A heatwave crashes over me. I let out a mangled, “What?”
He releases my throat, dragging that hand over my breast. He squeezes so hard that I yelp in pain, and then catches his lip between his teeth again.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” he murmurs, crushing me with his body again. His hand coasts down my belly, and I feel him move his erection aside so he can burrow his fingers between us.
“Fucking you.”
He wriggles his fingers through the folds of my dress. I quiver when he makes contact with my bare skin an inch above my underwear.
If he hadn’t been pressing my wrists to the wall, I might have ended up on the floor. The lower his fingers move, the more strength leeches from my body.
“You know where it will happen, don’t you?” His voice drops low. Rough, guttural. He barely sounds like himself. “In our special place, down there in the dark.”
His mouth touches the side of my neck and despite everything, a shiver dances over my bones. He slides his lips over my skin, and then grazes my jaw with his teeth. I twist my head away, terrified at how hard my heart is pounding.
His lips follow, and he nips at my jaw again. A moan slips out of me before I can stop it, and in response he groans and dips down.
“That place where no one can find you. Where no one can hear you scream.”
I gasp and jump onto my tippy toes when the crown of his cock presses against my underwear. A hard, aching throb pushes into me, almost as if he’d already broken through that flimsy barrier. He grabs my jaw and wrenches my head back to face him.
“And trust me, girl, we’ll make you scream,” he whispers, a malicious light dancing in his eyes. “Because it always hurts like fuck the first time.”
He devours me.
When I close my mouth, he forces it open with his tongue. When I try to move away from his cock, he slides a hand over my entrance and squeezes me so hard that I whimper into his kiss.
“Christ, we’re going to enjoy making you bleed.”
Shock finally battles through the confused blur of emotions roiling inside me. I bite down on his lip and buck my hips against him as hard as I can.
I taste blood in my mouth a second before he falls away from me. Staggering to the side, I barely find my feet before his hand is around my throat again.
Lights dance across my vision as he slams me against the wall.
“I like it when you fight. Playing with dead things isn’t any fun.”
He laughs at me.
And then he kisses me.
Blood and mint-sweet saliva mix in my mouth. He shoves his hand up my dress. Before I can slam my legs shut, he strokes me through my underwear with his knuckles.
That feather-light caress is so at odds with his kiss that for a long moment I’m lost.
His kiss slows, but becomes harder. Somehow more urgent. He strokes me again, sending a deep ache through me.
Instead of pushing him away, I claw my fingers into his chest.
His breath hitches.
He rakes his nails against my inner thigh, leaving a trail of fire behind. I gasp and rear back, and whatever had been keeping me at bay snaps.
Zach steps back, dragging a hand over his mouth. There’s a cut on his bottom lip, smears of blood around his mouth, but it doesn’t look like he’s bleeding anymore. He gives me a quick, condescending scan with his forest-green eyes, and then points to the classroom door.
“Clean up before someone sees you,” he grates.
And I move to comply without a thought. With my back turned, I stop.
“No.” I don’t turn back. I don’t look at him. If I see him, I’ll falter. “I’m not your puppet anymore. I’m not scared anymore.” I hear movement behind me, but I simply curl my hands into fists and refuse to let fear take root.
“Things have changed. I can’t go back there again. Not tonight. Not ever. And if you contact me again…if you threaten me again…”
I swallow hard and force myself to turn around.
Zachary’s watching me with a cocked head, face unreadable, body slack. As if his mind became disconnected from his body. It’s the most terrifying sight I’ve ever seen but somehow, I push through.
“If you or any of your brothers come near me again, I’m calling the police. Or the church, or something. Someone.”
Fuck it, Trinity, stay strong.
“Stay away from me. And stay away from Gabriel.”
The last is as much a surprise to me as it is to Zachary. He straightens his head with a snap, eyes boring into me like a physical force.
“Or I’ll tell him everything.”
I should have led with that. Zachary’s face slowly pales, but I know it isn’t with fear.
It’s anger, or rage, or a dirty-bomb of the two. I back up, and feel behind me for the door.
I turn the lock.
Then the handle.
I keep my eyes on him like I would a wild animal, just in case he decides to pounce on me before I’m in the clear.
The last thing I see before I close the door is Zachary’s face.
He looks like he’s seen a ghost…and he’s planning to murder it.
I barely make it to the downstairs restroom. I puke into the basin, my stomach contracting so painfully, I’m shocked there aren’t chunks of blood in the sink when I rinse it out.
It takes a few seconds before I can convince myself to look in the mirror.
My hair is mussed and my dress isn’t sitting right. But it’s the blood on my chin and around my mouth that makes me force down a dry retch.
Trust me girl, we’ll make you scream.
I have to get the hell out of this school.
Chapter Thirty-One
Zach
Reuben doesn’t bother to knock. It’s not that he doesn’t respect my privacy or any of that shit. The four of us never need permission to speak to each other, or even just to be in the same room. If we’d had to put up with pleasantries like that back in the basement, we’d all have gone stark raving mad.
“I came as soon as—” he begins.
“Sit.”
He takes the foot of the bed, perching picture perfect like always. Straight spine, chest out, chin up.
I watch him for a second, and then reach over to my drawer and take out a joint I’d rolled just for this occasion.
“It’s the middle of the day,” Reuben says. “Someone could—”
“What?” I snap. “Ex-communicate me?” I glare at him from the bed where I’m sprawled on my back.
As part of my pious disguise, I took a room more befitting a first-year student than a teacher. That’s Zachary fucking Rutherford for you. Groveling would-be priest who couldn’t swat a fly.
I’m not scared of you.
But she sure fucking looked it. Trembling like a newly born foal. It had taken every atom of self-control I still possessed not to pin her to my desk exactly like in Cass’s drawing, and fuck her into submission.
Monsters breed monsters.
Rube shakes his head when I pass the joint to him after lighting it up.
“I insist,” I say, pushing the words through my teeth.
He
could have argued. He might have won. Instead, he takes the joint, studies it, and hits it like a champ.
That’s what I love about Rube. He knows when to say yes, and when to say no.
That’s how he stayed sane with his Ghost. That evil motherfucker broke him over and over again. Eventually Rube stopped fighting. Every “no” turned into a “yes”. He taught himself to submit.
We’d all have been a lot better off if we hadn’t fought so hard. But then everyone except Cass would be as broken as him. Days like today I don’t know how Reuben can stand to look at himself in the mirror.
He hands back the joint without making eye contact.
“She won’t do it,” I tell him before taking a drag.
“Why?”
“Because sometime in the last twenty-four hours, she decided we’re full of shit and Gabriel’s a fucking saint.”
“She said that?”
“Pretty much.” I study the tip of the joint, and then move my focus to Rube’s face. He’s staring at nothing again—most convincingly. “He got in her head.”
Rube lets out a soft sigh through his nose before leaning back to dig in his pocket.
He exchanges a piece of mangled paper and his red rosary for the joint.
I read the note and then toy with the rosary while Rube helps himself to the rest of the joint.
She was lying to me. Not only is Gabriel not busy, he asked to see her tonight. I’m not sure I like this version of Trinity. It takes a special skill set to manipulate people with backbone. I don’t think I have the energy to play that game.
“Guess we should have seen it coming,” I say.
“So we’re back to Plan A?” Rube exhales a plume of smoke.
“Not yet.”
He looks across at me, frowning hard. “Then what?”
I wriggle my shoulders under me, pressing my head into my pillow. “I’ll go.”
“To see Gabriel?” Reuben sounds uneasy.
“She told me where he hid his laptop.”
“How will you get in?”
“I’ll figure out a way.” I wave my hand at him. “Leave it to Beaver.”
